So I presented the work-in-progress that resulted from my residency in Crete (at a conference in Rouen, France, in mid May, 2019). Indeed, excerpts from the manuscript of These White Shadows, still under development, but also and perhaps especially a whole set of drawings I completed while in Crete, such as this one which shows the setting where my mother experienced as a girl being shot at by a German plane, but here I have presented the situation from the pilot's viewpoint, with an accompanying excerpt from my book where I also take the pilot's perspective.
The whole presentation included more than a dozen drawings, including this one of the town, Kria Vrisi, the Cretan village where one of the characters from my book Incarnations of Evil settles with his son.
The presentation of an unfinished novel constitutes one of several strategies for dealing with intergenerational trauma, that is, trauma acquired as a result of the parent's experience, not one's own. Dealing with this kind of trauma is difficult, because a person's memories are no help at all. Instead, one must rely on fiction, on imagined scenes, on fiction fragments or on unfinished texts. Or on a work-in-progress... Indeed, both of these drawings include unfinished aspects - in the case of the first of these images, I have not been able to add the figure of my mother as a child, who should be present in the scene, while in the second image, in addition to the sketched in landscape, I suppressed the buildings that have gone up since the Second World War. The village appears as it might have during the war.